I walked down the empty road, slowly. I would take a day out. Just a day. No one would notice. A sickie. I could fill it however I liked. I could lie in the sun and read that book. I started to walk more quickly. I could hear my feet on the tarmac, carrying me along, as if they’d already made the decision to go someplace else by themselves. It was the first day of September, and the day still smelt like summer. I walked through puddles of warm and cool air. Above me, I could hear a bird singing a triumphant rising song, a victory song, that of a blackbird, perhaps. I pulled the jumper-turban off my head. I put my face to the sun.

I kept walking.

I hadn’t got a plan. I wondered vaguely if the school would contact my parents if I didn’t arrive. Willa would be busy in the sixth form center. It wouldn’t matter to her, and, anyway, she wouldn’t have a clue if I skipped a day.

In the distance I saw another large car glide out of a driveway and that was the moment I knew, with a clear and absolute certainty, that I didn’t want to be caught. Not today.

I nipped on to a pitted gray tarmacked drive and stood inside the deep shadows of an overgrown shrub. The car passed. Then I walked a little further up that drive. I’d always been slightly curious about that house anyway. It had a reputation, a mystery around it. First, it was the only house that couldn’t actually be seen from the road, and, second, people said it was genuinely old, or, as my father put it, “ripe for redevelopment.” Mostly people just called it the cat house.

I went slowly, picking my way along a drive that curved round beds of roses, until, at the last turn, I could see a tile-hung cottage with black metal window frames and thick ropes of ivy climbing up its walls.

I stopped. Standing on the edge of an oak-framed porch was a small elderly woman feeding a whole bunch of cats. There must have been eight or ten of them winding around her legs, their fat tails coiled into question marks, pink mouths open. The woman herself was wearing a tweed skirt, wellingtons and a thick brown jumper. I crept closer, keeping to a deep wall of shadow cast by overgrown plants, until I was near enough to see her fingers digging in a tin with a spoon. Her red knuckles were swollen, and her white hair was tied into a tiny scraggly bun at the back of her head. A black cat with yellow eyes looked me straight in the eyes and hissed. I froze. The old woman didn’t look up. A pigeon rose unsteadily from the trees, its papery wings crackling in the morning air.

Once the tins had been emptied of their contents, the woman scraped the entire contents of a plate on to the ground too. Then she went inside and pushed shut the door. Keeping to the edge of the undergrowth, I edged my way down the side of her garden, ready to dive under the bushes if I heard a sound. I kept my eyes on the door. Around the back of the house the gardens were divided into a maze of thin grassy pathways. I sat in a patch of sunlight and pulled some dandelions out of a bed of overblown dahlias. For a while I watched a tiny spider sitting quietly in its web. I rolled my blazer into a pillow and lay down. Above me the shifting shapes of the clouds became one thing, then another. I pulled out the book I’d taken from my mother’s bedside table. It had sat there for over a year, pristine and untouched since my mother had read the first few pages, declared herself more of a Jilly Cooper sort of girl and switched to Riders. I didn’t think she’d miss it. It was the cover that had caught my eye: a painting of two women in red robes and white caps dwarfed by a high brick wall. I began the first page.

I didn’t have a watch. When the light changed position, I did too. I read on; the book was really good. When I was hungry, I ate the plum. When I needed to pee, I squatted by a bush. I changed my pad and buried the old one in the earth. I slept too—I needed to. I hadn’t slept one wink on the Saturday night, curled up on the gritty concrete floor of the pool house. And then, in the middle of the night on the Sunday, I’d woken up with cramps and a strange wetness between my legs. I’d put my hand down and when it came up bloody and I realized I’d finally started my periods, I’d had to creep along the landing and drag Willa out of bed so she could show me where she kept all her sanitary bits.

In the bathroom she washed out my pajamas while I inspected my hair in the mirror. The cut my father had given me was an absolute shocker, a short, hard-edged, uneven bob with a fringe cut high above my eyes.

“It will grow,” Willa said.

“What, and let him cut it off again? Not a fucking chance. And I’m not having it like this either.” I grabbed the abandoned kitchen shears and held them toward her. “Cut it off. All of it.”

Willa froze. “Don’t be stupid,” she said, “you’ll be in such shit.”

“If I can’t have my hair the way I like it, I don’t want any at all. Do it.”

“Dad will kill you.”

I pushed the scissors into her hand. “Do it.”

***

Eventually violet-tinted shadows spread cold fingers across the grass, and the pools of sunshine faded into dusk. I put my jumper on, then my blazer, then drew my legs up and tucked my hands under my armpits. I wondered if there might be an old summer house hidden somewhere, or an unlocked shed. I wondered what time it was. I thought about going home. I thought about being a fly, letting myself in through an open window and landing on a wall, seeing my mother ask my sister if she’d seen me, calling the school, listening to its out-of-hours message; perhaps she’d call her friends. She’d worry. She’d have to tell my father. I thought about the bruises on my arms, their shifting edges and deepening blooms of color. Becoming one thing, then another.

I was cold, but it was thirst that got me in the end. Eventually I picked up my things and, keeping low, walked around the garden. I needed water—a hosepipe or an outside tap would do. But, as I neared the house, the front door opened and the old woman came out. I froze: she had to have seen me. Wearing slippers now, she made slow, unsteady steps toward a bird table with a tub of seeds and a handful of bread, and in the hazy light she walked straight past me. I’m already shapeshifting, I thought, into something else, a shadow, perhaps. A ghost. But the woman had her back to me now and the front door was open and, like some invisible robber-child, I slipped inside.

The dim, paneled hallway was hung with portraits, and ahead of me was a dark oak staircase. The first door on my right opened on to a small sitting room. Opposite an old TV was a deep green velvet sofa with a Chinese silk scarf thrown across its back and orange crocheted cushions; the entire room was stuffed full of books, some on shelves, others piled in great stacks on the floor. A tawny cat turned pale yellow eyes on me, and then opened its pink mouth into a yawn, showing small, white, pointed teeth. A carriage clock sat on a mantel above a tiled chimney place. It read 8:30, later than I’d thought. A small electric fire sat on a slate bed, two of its bars burning a soft red.

At the end of the hallway was a small kitchen with a black metal range and Formica units. A radio and pots of herbs sat on a window ledge, beneath which was a stained metal sink. Water. I had to be quick. I found a mug, turned on the tap and drank three lots in quick succession. There had to be a tea towel somewhere. I opened another door and found a pantry with shelves of cat food and several long wooden trays filled with onions, carrots, potatoes, apples, tomatoes and pears. There were jars of walnuts and a large metal sieve filled with fat green pods. I looked at the door. Only now I realized I wasn’t just thirsty, I was hungry too. How bad was it to steal from an elderly lady? Bad. But still, I helped myself to a pear, and then, with another quick glance at the door, stuffed handfuls of the bright green pods into my blazer pocket.

“Elisabeth?”

I froze, my guilty thieving fingers still gripping the stolen peas, and moved behind the door, willing every molecule in my body to freeze, painfully aware of each too loud breath.

“Elisabeth?” A thin voice shaking with age, or hesitation. “Are you here?”

Then the plaintive mewing of a cat.

“Well, girls,” she said, “Elisabeth was here. There’s her mug on the draining board, look. Elisabeth was here. And now she’s gone. And she didn’t even make me a cup of tea. She didn’t even say hello.”

I should go, I thought. Right now, before she comes into the pantry, with its half-open door. I could hear the old lady moving around the kitchen, the chink of china, the opening and closing of the fridge door, her shuffling steps. Then, after a while, silence.

I looked through the crack of the door. There was no one in the kitchen. Slowly, I slipped my feet out of my shoes and held them in one hand. I moved silently into the kitchen. I crept back into the hallway where the portraits continued to frown at my shady behavior. The door to the sitting room was open, and the TV cast an oblong of blue light across the hallway floor. The old woman would probably be sitting on the sofa in full view of the door. There was no way I could risk going past. I could scare her to death. She could just drop dead of a heart attack, right there. There was no way out. I looked up at the creaky-looking stairs. I crept back into the kitchen.

There was still one other door to try. I turned the handle and found myself in a cool tiled hallway where a back door led out to the garden and, as quietly as I could, I tried turning the handle. Locked. To my left was another, much narrower, set of stairs. Moving slowly and freezing each time they creaked, I made my way upstairs. At the top was a pink carpeted landing with dark oak doors. I opened the first one and found myself in what had to be the old lady’s bedroom, with a small double bed covered with a crocheted coverlet. An ornate freestanding wardrobe stood in one corner, and, in another, an armchair upholstered in pale pink linen. Under the window was a dressing table with a hairbrush and a few bits of jewelry: brooches, earrings, strings of cut-glass beads. I shut the door again and moved as quietly as I could down the landing.

Next was a small pink bathroom, then a small room with steeply angled eaves piled high with boxes, and finally a little room with a single bed with a padded silk quilt. The walls had paper speckled with tiny yellow flowers, and there was a small window that overlooked the curve of the drive. I sat on the bed. I was so hungry. I picked a bright green pod out of my pocket, ran a nail along its pale seam and watched it spring open, revealing a line of perfect peas. I picked one out with my fingers and put it on my tongue, rolling it around my mouth before biting down. It was, I thought, perhaps the loveliest thing I’d eaten in my entire life. It was dark outside now. I lay down, tucking myself under the quilt, cocooned in a mattress that was deep and old and soft. Outside I could hear the wavering call of an owl.

Just one night, I thought. Then I’ll go home.

I closed my eyes.

I thought, I am going to be in such deep shit.

It was thirteen hours since I’d left home.

Five hours since I should have arrived back.

Nineteen hours since I got my first period.

And fourteen hours since my father had come into my bedroom on the Monday morning. Everyone else was up. From the garden I could hear banging, hollering, the noise of a truck pumping out concrete. Willa had already left for school, and I’d spotted my mother through my bedroom window, walking rapidly down the drive with a large bunch of flowers. She’d be going to the neighbors’ house, I imagined, the bouquet intended as some sort of compensation for their smashed-in windows. I wasn’t late. I still had plenty of time to get to school. I just wasn’t in a hurry. I stood in front of my mirror and inspected my head. I was pleased with the result. Willa had done a great job. The ragged bob my father had given me had gone. All of it had gone. A couple of dark tufts stood upright in small clumps. In other parts the pale skin of my skull showed through. I looked like a baby chimp.

I didn’t hear my father coming until he stopped short in my doorway, “What in the hell?” He came closer. “Jesus Christ, you stupid bloody little cunt. How are you going to explain that to your school?”

“You gave me a haircut, remember?”

“Not that one. You lying little bitch.”

He made a swipe for me. I ducked, feeling a small triumphant bolt of joy whip through my heart: No hair to grab now. He came at me again. This time his fingers found my silver necklace and he yanked it hard. I felt the chain snap and the whole thing came away in his hand. He dropped it on the floor.

“That’s mine,” I said, bending toward where my little silver dolphin lay glinting on the rug. But before I could pick it up my father gripped my wrist and jerked me upright. I looked him straight in the eyes. “Careful you don’t break it,” I said, “again.”

That’s all it took. With both hands he slammed me against the wall. My head whacked the plaster and he put his face so close to mine I could feel the heat of his breath. “This family is sick of your wacko behavior, Laika,” he said. “Me, your mother, Willa, all of us. You think you’ve got all the answers, don’t you? Making out you’re better than the rest of us, prancing around like some little tart, spouting off.”

“What?”

He let go of my arm and jabbed me hard on my breastbone.

“Wait till you get out into the real world, find out then what happens to smartass little sluts.”

I righted myself, took a moment, then shoved him back as hard as I could and, before he could come at me again, I grabbed my bag and ran.

***

“How did you get in?”

I opened my eyes. The old woman was standing over me, holding something, a folded towel. Shit.